Douglas Lowy, M.D.

Douglas Lowy is chief of the Laboratory of Cellular Oncology in the Center for Cancer Research at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health. He is also a deputy director of the NCI, deputy director of the Center for Cancer Research, and acting director of CSSI at NCI. He received his medical degree from New York University School of Medicine, and trained in internal medicine at Stanford University and dermatology at Yale when Dr. Aaron Lerner was the head of the department. Doug’s research includes the biology of papillomaviruses and the regulation of normal and neoplastic growth. The papillomavirus research is carried out in close collaboration with John Schiller, with whom he has co-authored more than 100 papers over the past 25 years. In the 1980s, they studied the genetic organization of papillomaviruses and identified the oncogenes encoded by the virus. More recently, they have worked on papillomavirus vaccines and the papillomavirus life cycle. Their laboratory was involved in the initial development, characterization, and clinical testing of the preventive virus-like particle-based HPV vaccines that are now used in the two FDA-approved HPV vaccines. Doug's growth regulation research includes prior studies that established the importance of the ras gene family in cancer and the main mechanisms by which the NF1 tumor suppressor gene regulates normal cell growth. His growth regulation research is now focused primarily on the DLC family of tumor suppressor genes and their mechanism of action. As was true of Dr. Lerner, Doug is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the NAS.